Various mobile mining machines, such as rock drilling rigs, loading and transport equipment, are used in a mine. The mining machines may be manned or unmanned. The unmanned mining machines may be remote-controlled from a control room, for instance, and they may be provided with measuring devices suitable for location determination. The unmanned mining machines may be controlled to follow a desired route in a mine, provided that the location of the machine can be determined. The location of a machine may be determined by using laser scanners, for instance.
WO 2007/012198 discloses a method of guiding a mining vehicle automatically. By driving the mining vehicle manually or through teleoperation, an operator teaches the mining vehicle a route to follow with no operator intervention involved. U.S. Pat. No. 5,615,116 also discloses a method of automatically navigating vehicles, wherein a route used by a navigation system may have been taught through driving the vehicle or the route may have been determined manually.
After a route has been taught, the route may be edited and tested. Typically, it is this phase of teaching, editing and testing the route that is the slowest and most laborious one while introducing a new production area. A further problem almost invariably is that the teaching and testing of routes coincide with various mounting and foundation work to be carried out in the production area simultaneously, leaving very little time for testing.